Papers by Michelle Jordan
This qualitative case study sought to understand how disciplinary literacy practices associated w... more This qualitative case study sought to understand how disciplinary literacy practices associated with engineering design were used to facilitate communication among the four fifthgrade members of one collaborative learning group engaged in brainstorming initial design ideas for a remote-controlled, paddle-propelled robotic watercraft. Specifically, we focused on understanding how sketching was used by group members and for what purposes. Analysis of nine student-generated sketches and discourse during the team’s first work session suggested that sketching was “mixed and mashed” with other literacy acts to create design worlds, facilitate deep learning, and navigate pathways towards engineering goals.
Routledge eBooks, Jun 16, 2023
2022 IEEE 49th Photovoltaics Specialists Conference (PVSC), Jun 5, 2022
Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice
Speculative fiction is a powerful medium to explore possible futures, inviting literacy researche... more Speculative fiction is a powerful medium to explore possible futures, inviting literacy researchers and educators to consider the value of futures thinking as a tool for eliciting learners’ hopeful narratives about equitable, sustainable futures for their communities. Yet, when asked to imagine the future, adults and youth alike often envision dystopian stories and fail to consider the interdependencies between technological innovations and the social, economic, and environmental contexts they shape. Moreover, current pedagogic strategies for thinking about the future encourage globalized perspectives rather than stories localized in learners’ lived contexts. Using design-based research methods and informed by ecological theories that assume learners exercise agency through their actions that bring together past, present, and future, our team developed conjectures about how futures thinking might support learners’ agency in relation to sustainability activism and environmental justi...
The Journal of Classroom Interaction, 2016
The purpose of this study was to explore 188 third through eighth-grade students' patterns of... more The purpose of this study was to explore 188 third through eighth-grade students' patterns of social interaction related to a comprehensive school-based health program, and to investigate relationships between student social capital (i.e., number and frequency of interactions with friends, teachers, and guardians/family members) and teacher implementation. Analyses of survey responses across three time periods revealed that students' patterns of social interaction differed significantly by grade level (elementary versus middle school) and time. There were also significant associations between student social capital and teacher implementation of intervention activities. These results suggest that educational leaders and policy makers attend to social interaction as a lever for intervention success.
Learning and Individual Differences, 2015
The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore how students vary in their propensities for ... more The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore how students vary in their propensities for managing uncertainty they experience during academic tasks. Naturalistic observation and interviews were conducted with students collaborating on robotics engineering projects in a regular fifth-grade class. Techniques of grounded theory and microanalysis of discourse revealed five propensities for managing uncertainty. In particular, students varied in the size and composition of the set of tactics from which they drew and in their willingness to acknowledge uncertainty. Results contribute to theoretical understandings of uncertainty orientations as multi-dimensional and well represented by categories. They also contribute to the science of instruction by indicating that students with different propensities might benefit from differential teacher scaffolding. Suggestions are made for how teachers can shape students' management of uncertainty to facilitate learning.
A Critique of Creativity and Complexity, 2014
ABSTRACT The content, structure, and outcomes of educational experiences depend greatly on the mo... more ABSTRACT The content, structure, and outcomes of educational experiences depend greatly on the models through which individuals and groups of individuals view the world. The structure and content of many school curricula and standards are based on intuitions, beliefs, and assumptions about systems and learning founded on the models of 18th century scientists and philosophers such as Descartes, Newton, and Laplace. These scholars believed in scientific determinism; given accurate and complete information about the present we would be able to predict the future. Based on these assumptions, a fundamental purpose of schooling has often been to prepare children to participate in a finished and stable world. The purpose of this chapter is to suggest that a fundamental purpose of schooling is to help children prepare for life in a complex dynamic world. Educators' responsibility is to help children navigate a world that is fundamentally unknowable in many of its aspects and to relate to others in a world where interdependencies are key to creative structure and organization.
ABSTRACT Jordan, M. E., & Massad, M. (2010). Peer-to-peer talk about newspaper articles: ... more ABSTRACT Jordan, M. E., & Massad, M. (2010). Peer-to-peer talk about newspaper articles: Supporting knowledge and comprehension of an informational genre in a third grade classroom. Yearbook of the National Reading Conference, 59, 75-89.
Health Care Management Review, 2003
Surprise can emanate from two sources: lack of sufficient information or knowledge and the basic ... more Surprise can emanate from two sources: lack of sufficient information or knowledge and the basic dynamics of complex adaptive systems. The authors expand the traditional view of surprise with a complexity perspective that makes it possible to ask new questions and to consider new ways of understanding the world around us. They discuss creativity and learning as two strategies for capitalizing on the surprises that confront organizations.
Uncertainty is ubiquitous in life, and learning is an activity particularly likely to be fraught ... more Uncertainty is ubiquitous in life, and learning is an activity particularly likely to be fraught with uncertainty. Previous research suggests that students and teachers struggle in their attempts to manage the psychological experience of uncertainty and that students ...
Routledge eBooks, Jun 16, 2023
Instructional Science, 2016
Recent scholarship highlights the wealth of varied and interconnected opportunities for learning ... more Recent scholarship highlights the wealth of varied and interconnected opportunities for learning science that informal environments can provide; yet, participants with different experiences, knowledge, and backgrounds do not all learn in the same ways. Thus, studies are needed that examine how particular participants take up learning opportunities (LOs) in informal contexts. In this ethnographic case study, we focus on the learning experiences of one fifth-grade girl, Nina, who reported that she was not able to learn as much as she had hoped from her participation in an afterschool robotics engineering club. Through analysis of video-recordings, interviews, and field notes, we investigated how instructors and peers shaped LOs for Nina and the environmental tensions that affected how LOs were shaped and how Nina took them up. Comparison of examples in which instructor and peer-afforded LOs were realized and unrealized (i.e., presented in ways that Nina could take them up or not) illuminates multiple tensions. Club members faced tensions related to differing goals and abilities to teach each other, while the instructors faced tensions related to their roles in informal learning environments and their propensity to direct participants to other resources. As a result, many potential LOs for Nina in this rich inquiry learning environment where unrealized because instructors and peers did not shape them in ways that were explicit, elaborated upon, or connected to Nina's prior knowledge, and because Nina was not necessarily attuned to potential LOs in the informal context. We conclude with implications for instructors in informal learning environments.
His research interests include engineering student mentorship and leadership development, enginee... more His research interests include engineering student mentorship and leadership development, engineering research center education and diversity impact evaluation, and engineering graduate student attrition. Zhen earned a B.S. in Computer Science and an M.S. in Software Engineering, both from Xi'an Jiaotong University in China. He also received an M.S.E in Industrial Engineering from Arizona State University. Zhen also has over five years of collegiate teaching experience. Zhen is passionate and dedicated to better preparing the future engineering workforce.
Some conceptions of knowledge invite the emergence of new worlds and the exploration of possible ... more Some conceptions of knowledge invite the emergence of new worlds and the exploration of possible futures rather than attempt to reinforce stabilization and replication (Allen & Vargas, 2007; Osberg, Biesta, & Cilliers, 2008). The model by Mowat and Davis (2010) of mathematics as a "complex unity" makes such an invitation. If mathematics is a complex network of concepts linked by metaphors, then the understanding of mathematics needed by mathematicians, scientists, engineers, and students at all levels is not one of stationary concepts related in sequentially static order leading to the construction of a tower of mathematics, but a relational understanding of mathematics that privileges the dynamic interdependencies among and between mathematical concepts and metaphors and emphasizes the ways that boundaries connect as well as separate (Cilliers, 2001). Adoption of such a model could facilitate new understandings not only of what mathematics is, but also of what it means to learn mathematics. A tower is built sequentially step-by-step, brick by concrete, definite, solid brick; a brick is either locked in place or it is not, learning has either occurred or it has not occurred. But a network of mathematics, where concepts depend on the strength of multiple metaphors of differing weights and on their relationships to other concepts enables a conception of learning as an ambiguous and heterogeneous process in which concepts come in and out of focus and knowledge shifts between smoke-like and crystal-like organization (Taylor & Van Every, 2000). Learners need to expect learning experiences to proceed in non-linear fits and starts, for activities to be evolving and structuring, not pre-structured, and for
The analysis of school-age children engaged in engineering projects has proceeded by examining th... more The analysis of school-age children engaged in engineering projects has proceeded by examining the conversations that take place among those children. The analysis of classroom discourse often considers a conversational turn to be the unit of analysis. In this study, small-group conversations among students engaged in a robotics project are analyzed by forming a dynamic network with the students as nodes and the utterances of each turn as edges. The data collected for this project contained more than 1000 turns for each group, with each group consisting of 4 students (and the occasional inclusion of a teacher or other interloper). The conversational turns were coded according to their content to form edges that vary qualitatively, with the content codes taken from prior literature on small group discourse during engineering design projects, resulting in approximately 10 possible codes for each edge. Analyzed as a time sequence of networks, clusters across turns were created that all...
Understanding how young students learn to engage in collaborative design practices entails unders... more Understanding how young students learn to engage in collaborative design practices entails understanding social interaction processes that occur beyond collaborative groups. The purpose of this study was to understand how talk generated during whole-class public design critique sessions influenced collaborative groups in subsequent small-group work sessions. Analysis focused on data from one fifth-grade class in which students were challenged to collaboratively design, build, and program robots. Video-recorded and transcribed whole-class interactions from three design critique sessions across the second, third, and fourth day of a 14-day robotic engineering design project were examined in order to categorize the types of comments made by the teacher and students relative to the nascent design solutions of three focal groups. Collaborative discourse from subsequent small-group work sessions was then examined in order to understand what ideas students took up, as well as how they took...
Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-PEER), 2021
Given the increased attention on pre-college engineering education and its disciplinary nature pe... more Given the increased attention on pre-college engineering education and its disciplinary nature pertaining to language, discourses, and communicative practices, this state-of-the-art literature review focused on findings of research articles informed by qualitative and quantitative data to foreground communicative literacies within engineering design teams at the pre-college level. A disciplinary literacies framework was used to interpret and analyze published works in this particular domain. A search, selection, and inclusion process typical for state-of-the-art reviews yielded 33 studies. Constant comparison and open-coding led to clustering studies under five overarching themes in ranked order of frequency of occurrence pertaining to: (a) engineering disciplinary communicative literacies in practice; (b) matters of access with populations underrepresented in engineering; (c) learning STEM content through engineering design; (d) affective responses to uncertainty and risk in engineering design; and (e) evaluating the quality of collaboration. With respect to the themes, we discuss possibilities of using literacy frameworks to deepen theoretical and methodological insights into the study of phenomena related to within-group communicative literacies in K-12 engineering spaces.
2017 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition Proceedings
is as associate professor in the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University. Sh... more is as associate professor in the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University. She also serves as the Education Director for the QESST Engineering Research Center. Michelle's program of research focuses on social interactions in collaborative learning contexts. She is particularly interested in how students navigate communication challenges as they negotiate complex engineering design projects. Her scholarship is grounded in notions of learning as a social process, influenced by complexity theories, sociocultural theories, sociolinguistics, and the learning sciences.
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Papers by Michelle Jordan